Levi Nelson was shot in the head at Colfax. Ten months later he stood in a federal courtroom and named the men who did it.
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed. Levi Nelson needs to be remembered.
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He pulled down his collar and showed the jury his neck.
The court reporter for the New Orleans Republican took down what he said while he did it. This is the scar made by the bullet which struck my neck. February 1874, the old federal courtroom in the Custom House on Canal Street. Ten months earlier a man had stood fifteen feet from him and said he would shoot him through the head.
The Person
Nearly everything known about Levi Nelson comes from one day of sworn testimony.
He said he lived at New Hope plantation in Grant Parish, Louisiana. He said he had been a slave in Grant Parish before the war. He said he belonged to old Mr. Calhoun.
Old Mr. Calhoun was Meredith Calhoun, who bought fourteen thousand acres on the Red River and split the riverfront into four plantations. Cotton and sugarcane. The only whipping Frederick Law Olmsted saw with his own eyes, touring the slave states in the fifties, was on a Calhoun place. Calhoun’s shipping point was called Calhoun’s Landing, and after the war it became the town of Colfax.
So the parish was cut out of the plantation, and the citizens of the parish were the people who had been worked on it. When Levi Nelson walked to the courthouse in April 1873, he crossed ground he had been property on.
The Context
The Louisiana elections of November 1872 produced two governments. Neither side allowed that the other had won anything, and in every parish two sets of men claimed the same offices. In Grant Parish the argument came down to the courthouse at Colfax, and Black men from the surrounding country came in and held it.
They were not there to make a point. Nelson put it plainly: they assembled at the courthouse because they were too frightened to remain home. He stayed ten or twenty days.
On Easter Sunday they came, a hundred and fifty of them or more, with a small cannon on a pair of cart wheels. What happened over the next fifteen hours killed somewhere between sixty-two and eighty Black men, most of them after they had surrendered.
Here is the part that has to be said at full strength. Testifying could not work. Murder was a state crime, and Louisiana was not going to try white men for killing Black ones. The United States Attorney in New Orleans, James Beckwith, could reach the killers only by charging them with conspiring to deprive two citizens of rights under the Enforcement Acts — a statute three years old, resting on constitutional ground nobody had tested. It was a workaround, and every lawyer in that courtroom knew it. A sensible man in Grant Parish in the winter of 1874, asked to name neighbors who had already shot him once, could have looked at that statute and concluded he would be throwing his life away for a theory.
The Decision
The trial opened on February 23, 1874. Nelson testified on the fifth day.
He described the cannon and the iron slugs it fired, Shack White holding up a white flag and Bill Irwin shooting him down, being made to put out a burning building and then cursed by a man who said he had not come four hundred miles to kill niggers for nothing. He described thirty-seven prisoners under guard, Nash saying it would not do to take prisoners and then kill them, and Hickman answering that unless the prisoners were killed they would kill Nash.
He described being taken out at midnight in a pair with a man named Mac Brown. The shooter told them he would shoot them through the heads. The bullet cut Nelson’s neck and glanced off and dropped him. Mac Brown yelled where he fell and was shot five more times. Somebody said to shoot Nelson again, that he was not dead. Nobody did. He lay on his face until daylight with dead men around him, listening to the men who had shot him talk about killing, then crawled off the field without daring to stand up.
Then he named them. Dr. Compton, Clement Penn, Oscar Given, Prudhomme Lemoine, Bill Cruikshank and his brother, Bill Irwin, John Hadnot, Denis Lemoine, Tom Hickman — all of them sitting in the room while he said it. He pointed out the first three without hesitating.
The defense worked him over on cross-examination and got nothing. The newspaperman covering the trial wrote that it was evident Levi knew exactly what he was saying, although he had a halting way of expressing himself.
The last thing he said on direct examination was four words. “I was a voter.”
He was not the only one. More than fifty Black survivors testified at the two Colfax trials, among them Benjamin Brim, shot through the face and again through the back the same night, who crawled two hundred yards between dark and daybreak. It is fifty men who came in from a parish full of their attackers and told a federal court what had been done, and the one whose name the law happened to pick up and carry.
The Aftermath
The first jury hung. On March 16, 1874, the judge declared a mistrial.
The second trial opened in May with Justice Joseph Bradley of the Supreme Court on the bench beside Judge Woods. On the evening of June 10 the jury convicted William Cruikshank, John Hadnot, and Bill Irwin, and acquitted four others. Sixteen days later Bradley went through the indictment count by count, explained why each was improper, and threw the whole thing out. No valid charges meant no valid convictions. The white residents of Grant Parish celebrated.
The case went up. On March 27, 1876, Chief Justice Morrison Waite delivered the opinion of the Court. The Fourteenth Amendment restrained states, not private men. What had been done at Colfax was a state offense, and the state would have to answer it. The convictions were reversed. No justice dissented.
The counts Waite struck down had names in them. They charged the defendants with banding and conspiring to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one Levi Nelson and one Alexander Tillman, citizens of the United States, of African descent, and persons of color. Tillman was dead, killed after the surrender, as Nelson had testified. Nelson was alive. The doctrine that stripped the federal government of the power to protect Black citizens for sixty years was written on an indictment built around one dead man and one living one, and the living one had walked into court and made it possible.
That scar is worth staying with. It was the only physical evidence of Levi Nelson the United States ever entered into a record, and the only description of his body that survives. No photograph of him is known to exist. No sketch, no engraving, nothing in the illustrated press. The same is true of Benjamin Brim, of William Ward who commanded the militia, and of Alexander Tillman whose name sits beside Nelson’s in the United States Reports. Waite was photographed. Bradley was photographed. Cruikshank was photographed. What we have of the man who survived the executions is six inches of scarred skin, described by a newspaper stenographer on an afternoon in February.
After 1874 the record stops. No death date, no later account, no confirmed entry in any census.
He testified, and the paper closes over him.
The Meaning
I have tried to work out what that silence means and do not think it can be settled.
One reading is that he ran — that a man who had named nine armed neighbors in open court and then watched the Supreme Court turn them loose would have understood what was coming, and would have gotten out of Louisiana or out of his own name. It may be right.
The other reading is duller and I suspect more likely. The federal records that survive from that place and time are labor contracts, registers of complaints, and rolls of the indigent applying for rations — documents that record a Black man as a unit of work, a grievance, or a mouth. Levi Nelson may simply have lived out an ordinary poor life in a place with no reason to write him down, and died in a year no one recorded, the way most people in history do.
The silence may be a verdict.
It may just be silence.
What I keep coming back to is the four words. Everything else in his testimony is description — the cannon, the fire, the flag, the pistol fifteen feet away. Those four are the only place he explains anything. I was a voter. He is telling a federal court the reason, and the reason is that he had voted in Grant Parish, Louisiana, in November of 1872.
The Court he was speaking to would rule, two years later, that it could do nothing for him.
He said it anyway, on the record, where it has stayed for one hundred and fifty-two years and where it can still be read.
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Sources: Testimony of Levi Nelson and Benjamin Brim, New Orleans Republican, February 28 and March 4, 1874, reprinted in Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality (Library of America, 2018), 449–55. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876); United States v. Cruikshank, 25 F. Cas. 707 (C.C.D. La. 1874) (Bradley, J.). Trial chronology from the Law Library of Louisiana, “Reconstruction in Louisiana: The Colfax Massacre.” LeeAnna Keith, “Colfax Massacre,” 64 Parishes (Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities). David Ballantyne and Charles Lane, “How Many Died in the Colfax Massacre?,” Journal of the Civil War Era (July 2026). LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre (Oxford, 2008); Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died (Henry Holt, 2008).
Next in this series: Abram Colby — they offered him money to quit, then nearly beat him to death. He told Congress every word.
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Charles C. Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he employs AI tools in a limited, supporting role for research, occasional image creation, and editing, while the prose and judgment remain entirely his own. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live and co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.
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